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Former Argentine president convicted of arms trafficking

(Xinhua)

08:35, June 14, 2013

BUENOS AIRES, June 13 (Xinhua) -- Argentina's former president Carlos Menem, currently a senator, was convicted and sentenced Thursday to seven years in prison on charges of "trafficking arms to Ecuador and Croatia," according to media reports.

The verdict also banned Menem, who served as president from 1989 to 1999, from holding elective office and asked the Senate to vote on stripping him of his parliamentary immunity, so he could be arrested and taken to prison.

Former Defense Minister Oscar Camilion was also found guilty and the court ordered on Thursday that he serve five and a half years in prison.

Menem, a senator for his home province of La Rioja, cannot be jailed unless he is stripped of immunity by two-thirds of the Senate, the appellate court said.

The court found Menem, now 82 years old, guilty of being "co- author of the crime of smuggling, aggravated by the fact that it involved military weapons and required the intervention of public officials," overturning a lower court's acquittal two years ago.

Menem can appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court.

Argentina could not supply Ecuador with weapons as it was a peacekeeper after Ecuador and Peru fought a brief war in 1995. And arms sales to Croatia were internationally banned during the 1991- 1995 wars that disrupted the former Yugoslavia republic.

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